Casablanca (1)

I speak with the greatest sincerity and utmost gravitas when I say that I may be the most unqualified person to write a film review. I am certainly the least qualified of all my friends. I am excitable enough to blindly believe my first impressions and over-confident enough to declare them with every pretense of alacrity. I have been through high school and college and I find myself to be well - though not perfectly -“educated.” Nonetheless, in the realm of cinema I am generally worthless. Such a phenomenon is no surprise even today: I have been a terrible critic of film my whole life. As a child I spent a great deal of my summers curled up in front of the television watching and re-watching Tombstone or the Indiana Jones movies. Don’t get me wrong, these are not at all bad movies, but I was fully unaware of any characteristics by which someone else might call them praiseworthy. I watched them and many others with the most unobservant eye, but the most open heart. I watched in order to spend time being Doc Holiday or Indiana Jones. I engulfed my whole self into the characters and the action, so that I could participate in their lives alongside them. This was why I watched movies and is still why I watch them today. It is not how I read books or observe art. It is not how I listen to music. But I cannot escape my being completely overpowered by movies, time and again. But, since I entertain the image of myself as a thinking man, I cannot fully surrender my interpretations, wholly suspend my judgments when I think about movies. This is why I am so thoroughly unqualified to review movies. It also happens to be why I nonetheless feel so drawn to review them.
Thus, I approach this task with a vast and deep division inside me. I am so enamored by Casablanca that I cannot help but write about it, but I am so self-conscious about saying anything worthwhile that I can hardly know where to begin. (Before beginning I would also like to add that, being 22 years old and having never been married, the brief digression on marriage is entirely a matter of speculation and a subject of which I claim no sagacity. Any truth that I have hit upon is a blessing, however it is a happy coincidence. Nonetheless, it is a subject that I treat with the greatest sincerity and about which I have ruminated for many years.)
Casablanca, which is second behind Citizen Kane in the AFI’s “100 Greatest American Films” and immediately before The Godfather, is arguably the greatest "Hollywood" film of all time, a film that can be enjoyed academically as well as it can be entertaining. Citizen Kane is a great film, but it seems to me to be too much a film for films, too much a testament to its own legend, perhaps too vast to be limited to the genre of “film.” The Godfather (by this I mean 1 and 2, while the AFI indicates just 1; Godfather 2, the only sequel to appear on the list is at number 32) is also great but too epic, too long and deals with too many different themes to be considered a pure "Hollywood" film. Casablanca, on the other hand, is relatively short (about one hour and forty-five minutes) and its varied themes are neatly tied to the two principal themes of love and war. Few films are allowed to have such a fluid storyline, and navigate the difficult waters between eclecticism and making a point. The readability of the script (it is based on a play called Everybody Goes to Rick's) is also a testament to the permanence of its success. That it is in the realm of the greatest films of all time places it on par with other great works of art and literature, and the very tradition of great works. Why discuss whether or not Casablanca is the greatest film of all time? Does such a question seem even answerable at all, much less important? Maybe not, but I raise in an attempt to illustrate what kind of a movie Casablanca is. What kind of a movie it is seems to me to be a very deep question, one that may seem obvious but is in fact not very easy to answer.